Web Fonts

Adobe have just recently announced the release of Adobe Edge Web Fonts, a large library of web fonts. Whilst Adobe has teamed up with Google in order to offer many of these typefaces, they are served through TypeKit—which was bought by Adobe some months ago—and are free to use (for now, at least).

I am a great fan of using web fonts—anything has to be better than constant doses of Arial. There are certain pitfalls and caveats that web designers do need to bear in mind, but I shall cover those in a later post.

Right now, I would like to make an observation—simply because it amuses me…

Ten years ago, companies were getting frustrated that they couldn’t use their super print-specified corporate fonts on their websites (at least not without using some horrible substitution system like Flash or Cufon).

So, in the last few years, we have seen more and more companies changing their corporate image—and all of their print and branding material—to one of the 30-odd typefaces available to “normal” web browsers (such as Trebuchet or Lucida).

Now, the web font revolution has hugely expanded the number of typefaces available on the web—rendering all of the rebrands utterly unnecessary!

It seems to work with Edge Web Fonts by simply copying and pasting the contents of their JS file into a local copy and referencing from my WordPress intranet theme. However, their terms say:

If permitted by your subscription plan, you may embed a link to selected Licensed Fonts within a Registered Website via encoding, but not via download of any files.

So it seems that although technically possible with Edge Fonts to serve locally it is not viable for us right now as we would need to be fully compliant and demonstrate compliance at any time.

UPDATE: It worked for so long and yes, like Chris said above, a call is made within the JS to TypeKit to download materials. This is blocked by our proxy here at the moment so it doesn’t work. Oh God please don’t make me go down the sIFR route.